Trying to take sides in a world colored gray

JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, December 31, 2002

MAKE UP YOUR mind, they say. And as I sat in the middle right corner of Burke Hall 1, one of about 50 students eager for a two-hour teach-in to begin, I kept trying to figure out what I thought and where I stood.

A war with Iraq seemed inevitable; because most of my friends and classmates vehemently opposed it, I felt compelled to decide which side of the debate I was on.

"War is a time when people open their eyes," said Nancy Mitchell, who represented the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) and started the teach-in at San Francisco State University. The looming war, Mitchell said, is about oil, about American arrogance. It must be stopped.

Mitchell, who visited Baghdad in 1998, was followed by two university professors. All three urged students to act sooner rather than later; build a strong anti-war movement, they prodded, right here, right now.

"Do whatever you can do whenever you can," said Professor Dwight Simpson, who teaches international relations at SFSU. "Don't sit idly."

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I didn't. Oddly, I found myself changing seats all night -- first I sat in the middle, then in the front and later in the back, next to a woman in her 40s who was munching on Fritos and sipping Pepsi.

Finally, I returned to the middle, where I remained standing.

I'M NEITHER A Republican nor a Democrat; the words "conservative" and "liberal" -- ubiquitous and polarizing terms -- mean little to me. Placing myself on either side seems too easy, too convenient, for such a complex world,

where the gray area is bigger than the black and the white. I figure that what's needed, instead of a political chess game, is logic and reason; instead of partisan bickering, name-calling and questions of patriotism, what's needed is an open debate -- a public debate -- where all sides are acknowledged.

In the case of war, in which principles and lives and posterity are at stake, the you're-wrong-and-I'm-right mentality -- the "you're with us or without us" rhetoric -- heard in both the pro-war and anti-war groups seems wholly inappropriate and blindingly simplistic.

So toward the end of the question-and-answer portion of the teach-in, after all that was said sounded much of the same, I asked myself, "Can we get a different view here?"

Then Mars Tremor, sitting in front with hunched shoulders, raised her hand. "My friend, who's in the Army, is not sure what to think," said Tremor, a 21- year-old art major from Rodeo, in the East Bay, her voice hesitant and low. The group fell silent.

"My friend doesn't want to go to war, but she's afraid if we don't, Saddam, or others like him, might get to us first."

There's fear, Tremor told me afterward, and it's valid.

"This is not so cut and dried," she said. "It's really hard to understand what's going on. It's tough to sift through the crap, you know, and people need to respect that. I'm still learning, still educating myself about what's going on."

I LISTEN TO the pundits on TV and the folks chatting in cafes, where I now sit, talking of a doomed world supposedly connected by the Internet yet divided by religious, cultural and economic differences. And I, like Tremor, get a little scared.

A part of me wants to close my eyes, to shut up; a part of me wants to raise my hand, call for action and lead. A part of me wants to find reason in both sides and seek balance.

In a world of nuclear power, in a country under attack, war and peace seem absolute. Is there no middle ground?

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